Shift key is widely used in Eastern Asian input methods to switch between English and Asian scripts. Pressing Shift while holding Alt is the way to cycle through different input methods on windows systems. Using shift key is a decent idea for Latin script users, but is terrible for Asian script users.
> It’s intended to be a safety tool. A way for people in unstable, potentially violent, domestic situations to quickly leave the page.
An upsetting but nonetheless incredibly interesting abnormal UX problem to solve. I appreciate seeing this much thought being put into things like this.
I understand that they couldn't use the Escape key, and so having an alternative makes sense, but I'm not sure as a user how I would ever discover the behavior of pressing "shift" three times.
Escape might be more intuitive but it's not more discoverable. Shift is used often when inputting information, and the mentioned visual feedback give this behavior an opportunity to be discovered.
Having said that, regardless of the key the guidelines on using this pattern say that you should explicitly inform the user of the feature before they first encounter it.
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/exit-a-page-qu...
I’m curious about this history of this. What page are people on that might lead to domestic abuse?
What do they use frequently enough that they would learn about this exit functionality rather than just clicking a bookmark bar, closing the tab, or just switching the tab?
This seems like such a contrived scenario with a solution that only works for gov uk sites. Why not teach users how to switch or close tabs with keyboard shortcuts?
> What page are people on that might lead to domestic abuse?
I assume there's a .gov.uk page somewhere that lists resources for people who are in abusive relationships. I imagine if an abusive partner walked in to find you reading that, that might set them off.
There's some examples (and a pretty sad graph on _when_ users are looking at these resources) on the user research summary: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system/discussions/...
Another example: There’s a page in the iOS settings where you can remove people from your family group and change your password (or do other things you might do if someone was after you). It has a “quick exit” button that kicks you back to the Home Screen, but also completely kills the Settings app so said person wouldn’t know you were on that page if they yoinked your phone.
https://support.apple.com/guide/personal-safety/how-safety-c...
> This seems like such a contrived scenario with a solution that only works for gov uk sites. Why not teach users how to switch or close tabs with keyboard shortcuts?
+1. "Close tab" is more robust, well-supported and well-known.
It seems more likely a user will load an inoccuous page as a decoy, than learn triple-shift is a quick exit.
Still, interesting read, to hear the reasoning. Would like to see empirical evidence/user testing.
Many possibilities. Something seeking legal help, or an info page about domestic abuse itself, or something around financial literacy.
I would really like to know whether this feature gets any (non-accidental) use. It's certainly an important problem to solve, and I can see the technical merit in the solution proposed. What I'm left wondering is how this solution is most effectively communicated to the people who need to know about it, such that they're able to make use of it correctly in the critical moments when they need to use it. For obvious reasons there are probably no good statistics on this, but I wonder what the user research was like.
Ideally this should pre-load the BBC weather page so switching to it is (near-)immediate. Currently it can take a while to load. Replace all DOM and then replace URL should do it.
There is also the matter of history; if I load the demo page, click that button, and press "back" then I'm on the demo page again.
And of course it'll be in the browser history.
I have to question how practically useful this is. Ctrl+W or middle click on tab isn't that far off. Or open private window and close that, which is a smart thing to do anyway.
Never mind that computers and internet access is ubiquitous enough these days that "using the family computer" for this sort of thing isn't really needed in the first place.
Overall this seems like a IE5-era solution that's pretty outdated and useless today. Perhaps even worse than useless because the implementation is so-so and protection it offers low.
Overall, I'd say telling people to use private windows and teaching then Ctrl+W is probably better.
1. This kind of browsing is more likely to be done on a phone, in private. I find the scenario a bit contrived in 2024.
2. It seems a bit weird to be concerned about UI patterns if you earnestly want this component to do its job.
3. If it's that important, the Escape key event can be added after DOMContentLoaded. Warn content authors to not overuse the component, and it would be fine. You can still have the triple-Shift key event for those cases that they specifically call out.
Its entirely plausible that someone in an abusive relationship is a number of mitigating circumstances:
- they don’t have a smartphone, or it’s been taken off them
- they’re forced to use a desktop because their abuser doesn’t want them to do things in private easily
- plausibly mobile has something different entirely, given that this appears to be desktop focused.
- They mention escape is intercepted by most browsers to stop loading, if someone is interrupted midway and panics and starts hitting escape, they could plausibly end up _stuck_ on the page they were trying to hide from their abuser.
How are people expected to know about the Shift key functionality?
Yeah, it seems a little obscure. Here's a test page with the functionality:
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/exit-this-pa...
One cool thing is when you first hit the shift key once, the "Exit this page" button expands vertically, and shows three small circles, one now filled in. So it makes it obvious that hitting the shift key did something related to that button. So if you hit the shift key for any other reason, you'll see something happen.
But still, I agree it seems a little hard to discover.
Out of curiosity I edited the page to put a textarea on it, so I could see what happens when you're typing a sentence and happen to use Shift 3 times: It breaks the button.
If the cursor is in the textarea, tapping Shift without any other keys will add 1 circle, but if that wasn't the 3rd one, any additional Shift will remove all the circles and they don't come back. You have to click outside the textarea and hit Shift 4 times to trigger it (the first one doesn't register any circles).
It seems like they tried to prevent accidental triggers (if you have 1 or 2 circles and hit anything except Shift they all disappear, and if you hold Shift while hitting another key you don't get any in the first place), but got something slightly wrong.
That's what I wondered. Presumably services implementing it will add info about using the button before starting the journey, but I'm surprised there's no design system guidance about this. Without that information the button is far less useful.
This is a great idea! How come when I google "gov uk domestic violence" none of the govt pages have this button on them?
My first search result was thehotline.org, and it does have a button that redirects to google.com. (But that's a US site)
> You can quickly leave this website by clicking the “X” in the top right or by pressing the Escape key twice.
And it does have some kind of Escape key functionality.
The gov.uk page has some listed hotlines by nation (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/domestic-abuse-how-to-get-help#g...), but none of them are actually using that exact red button:
- https://www.nationaldahelpline.org.uk/ uses green bookmark in bottom right and redirects to google.co.uk
- https://dsahelpline.org/ has a green area at the bottom right
Would be pretty cool if it also changed the page navigation history to obscure where the user was before visiting bbc weather. If users taking the triple click action are presumed to be in distress, you'd want to remove the ability of the other party to simply click "back" and see where they were.
This site is flagged by malwarebytes as being compromised for some reason - I'm assuming this is a false positive given that no one else has been having issues
They're pretty forthcoming for what I assume to be an government agency.
I wonder why the gov.uk team are getting so much publicity(?) In the last few years.
As much as I love the aesthetic, I'm developing a fear that they'll soon spin off into a startup with some kind of paid model, and that government websites will regress.
Irrational fear, I know, but I cant shake off the startup-vibes I'm getting when I read such posts about what is essentially a public service.
> As much as I love the aesthetic, I'm developing a fear that they'll soon spin off into a startup with some kind of paid model, and that government websites will regress.
gov.uk got started, in part, because the 2009 financial meltdown left a lot of good startup designers and engineers with not enough to do (and made civil service jobs more attractive for a bit!)
fwiw this isn't an official gov.uk blog post. I mistook it for one at first too... I only double checked once I stumbled over the "advertising people being bastards" line.
Compared to many other countries, UK has a computer science culture that's very open about how technology is used in every day lives, and it invites public participation in new tech. This shows a lot in the government as well as its services like BBC and NHS, and the academia.
It's a very broad topic to cover so I'll be terse with evidence/examples only. UK government provides a lot of open data and APIs for the country [0], [1]. They are free and pretty much not throttled. They have a license [2] for a lot of this data which is formal but nearly as free as John Carmack's legendary hacker-friendly "have fun" license [3]. There is also a lot of historical Ordnance Survey data and historical legislation data from the National Archives. And of course, you can see the openness in how they have built gov.uk, as blog articles appear on HN about it quite often.
There is also a lot of government infrastructure provided to local governments, such as gov.uk Notify [4] or a freely available NHS website CMS (which is why many NHS websites work the same). There is a guide [5] mostly intended for government services but free for others to use on building accessible, secure and quite good-looking websites.
Most other governments I lived under are either technically behind UK or they have very advanced tech capabilities in certain branches of the government only (such as the armed forces) but keep it out of the public eye. Ultimately, I think it is the culture of welcoming everyone's participation in technology that makes UK gov so forthcoming and open with their tech and data. Doing this is seen as kind and civilised, which is how governments want to be seen. Of course, there are still areas of improvement in how UK gov provides data, as there always are in everything.
Finally, I should mention you can find many BBC technology outreach programmes from the early days of home computing. They are all over YouTube if you search for "BCC home computing". There was and continues to be a lot of techno-optimism in the country. It is one of the admittedly not many things that persist from the pre-austerity times.
[1] https://www.api.gov.uk/index/#index
[2] https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-lice...
[3] https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/blob/master/README.TXT (before GPL became popular, id software code was distributed with this readme that said "Have fun")
> This shows a lot in the government as well as its services like BBC and NHS, and the academia
Salaries play a significant role.
Unlike a lot of other countries, private sector salaries for SWEs suck in much of the UK, and gov.uk (in reality part of the Civil Service), GCHQ+MoD, and BBC can pay fairly competitively and give a fairly decent pension compared to private sector gigs.
That said, I'd disagree with NHS IT - it's almost entirely outsourced to regional MSPs who suck (and I say this as a former vendor who's helped sell products those guys use in NHS environments)
Wait why not have both esc x3 and shift x3 work? Any of these are "weird" keypresses right?
Here it is in action:
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/exit-this-pa...